Ideas for Heart of Darkness

In Sven Lindqvist, “Exterminate All the Brutes”, he explores in depth the impression that European colonialism has on civilization, and argues that the ideas of “enlightenment” in the social and human evolutions had become the logical reasoning behind what he believes to be genocide. The title itself, spawns from the fictional and horrifying tale of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. He extends and furthers the ideology of Hannah Arendt, that imperialism itself is the pillar of racism, which that very idea itself stems from an Enlightenment “scientific theory”.

Lindqvist’s book is written as a travelers diary, that has become an examination of european racism through their history over the past two centuries.

He argues that the distressing racism of European society, stems from colonial past. When thinking of genocide we think back to the Holocaust, or even the Armenian genocide, yet Lindqvist’s reminds the reader that genocide is not a foreign concept to the Europeans. Genocides have always been warranted by one racial feeling more superior than another, colonial expansion and imperialism. Lindqvist’s reasoning for writing “Exterminate All the Brutes”, it seems like is that he feels as though history is “swept” under the rug or brushed over by the victors. No one enjoys talking of the past and yet he felt as though it needed to be re exposed because he feels as though the things of our past are erased with certain events.

This is emphasized through a quote in the book, Lindqvist’s conveyed this through ‘We do not want to remember. We want genocide to have begun and ended with nazism. That is what is most comforting.’ (site) Lindqvist’s emphasizing the idea that as society we like to pretend that racial ends with a singular issue is our problem, like assuming segregation ended with Jim Crow. Although this book was written in 1996, it still renders complete significance to our modern culture that still suffers from the damage behind the mindset of exterminating all the brutes.

I thoroughly enjoyed Lindqvist’s writing and thought that his reasoning was very well compiled and thoroughly thought through and I felt as though his emphasis on Arendt’s ideology was superb and extremely relevant in today’s climate. When Lindqvist was younger, he had seen a photograph that pictured troops from Britain, what he saw absolutely disturbed him. Bodies that looked as though they had been starved, overworked and the epitome of burnt out in any onlookers eyes. Years later he read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and he had an epiphany he had adamantly discovered that the Africans he read about were tirelessly worked by white colonist and realized that these two images he had created were connected.

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